Also there is a special selection of Hinnonmaki Red doing the rounds in the U.S called ‘Little Ben’ which in commercial tests has produced yields of 8 to 9 pounds.

It sets flowers freely, never seems bothered by pH issues(thrives in heavy soil), has rare mildew issues mostly limited to one or two leaves rather than on the fruits. It’s quite vigorous compared to other cultivars and propagates very easily.

The yield is about 1.5kg giving medium large sized green fruits when established and it’s ideal for a decorative tub. The apricot taste they talk of is pure baloney, but it is very sweet when ripe. Nice plant to grow and very healthy!

Any of the Hinno group is a prolific producer of flowers in a short space when established and not bothered by frost etc. Hinnonmaki Yellow is very reliable in this respect and grows anywhere.

Even in the old cultivars like Woodpecker (which is prone to mildew and root rot) no suckering ever occurred underground as the plant stays on one leg. These types are largely restricted and grown for the amateur societies or show bench competitions and not worth growing for fruit quality as they tend to be sour.

Lord Derby and Lancashire Lad have good desert quality with some mildew protection as does Hedgehog my favourite desert one alongside Red Jacket.

It breaks bud earlier than any cultivar I’ve seen and thrives in heavier soil similar to Whinnam’s Industry. My plant has green tips showing now in its plant pot.

The plant is true to type according to its label. Xenia is very upright and prefers a heavier soil. It also got some bad mildew on its leaves after producing a light crop. Maybe this year it will crop heavier and thorns get weaker? So far not impressed by it!

I’m afraid this is a daily check for months at a time from April. Cabbage white caterpillar is another nuisance from June onwards. Only the Hinnonmaki Yellow plant for me, is resilient to withstand these pests. Plants like Captivator are stripped bare within a few weeks, but recover. However the downside is once a plant loses vital leave growth, the fruit which sawfly don’t touch never sizes and remain very small.

The yield is good, about 5 pounds on an established plant, ripening mid July for two weeks. What I really love about this plant is its ability to root if its willow like ‘tendrils’ get buried under soil and a cutting roots fast within 10 days during warm weather in early/mid Spring.

Relatively its small compared to other gooseberries getting no higher than 2 feet and just as wide, with quite huge leaves. Could get bigger I suppose if planted in the garden, but mine is in a big tub. The needle thorns are easier to manage than say Invicta. Top plant, and only one I grow now as space is an issue.

1.Hinnonmaki Red – superb, fantastic yielder and zero mildew. Sawfly attacks rare in older plantings. Average yield 6 pounds a season.

2.Hinnonmaki Yellow: Scruffy looking low growing plant, but a very good yielder(3 to 5 pounds) of medium large sweet fruits. Needs pruning to keep its shape and productivity. Mildew attacks rare. Sawfly like its young leaves.

3.Hinnonmaki Yellow X unknown wild seedling cross from a local nursery: Huge fruits 15 to 20g, mildew prone in humid conditions. Good cropper of 5 pounds or more. Very thorny like Invicta(bland fruit so don’t grow it anymore) and tough. Sawfly leaves it alone as its leaves are very resilient. Vigorous.

4.  Captivator: a real pleasure to grow and a good cropper. Vigorous plant and sawfly loves its leaves. Mildew incidences zero.

5.  Lady Sun. Semi thornless like Captivator but more thorns. Strange one as flowering mostly happen on 3 year old wood and its 4 year old wood remains productive for many years past. I have an unpruned plant with 10 year old branches remaining very productive still sprouting out new canes on its framework. Fruits are yellow largish and very tasty. Rich with sugar and best tasting gooseberry of all! Pity yield is low as it is a lovely plant to grow. Mildew can affect its leaves rarely. Very vigorous shrub like plant which suckers a lot. Cuttings can strike within a week in a humid Spring!

Exception to this is gooseberry Captivator which is excellent. I would stick with any of the Hinnonmakis which are tried and tested or Invicta, if you can endure its thorns! Below is a link giving a comparison review of Xenia only, without observations on yield.

https://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/plaveg/pbrpov/cropreport/goo/app00002996e.shtml

Fruit size is around 3 to 5 grams or sometimes even bigger in mid to late July (David who gives an in depth review of Captivator on this very site may tell you more!), but in the first few years after planting the fruit tends to be smaller than usual.

Don’t give up on your plant just yet. Maybe move it to a heavier soil or add more nutrients like bonemeal to bolster it. Once it’s happy it will reward you for years.

Your biggest worry should be sawfly which loves its leaves and depletes the plant vigor, so the following year’s fruits will be smaller, as the plant is putting its energy into growth.

Captivator another delightful plant is one which bears flowers quickly and can fruit on one year old stems from mid July. It is a successfully grown plant in Europe. I’ve tried some gooseberries and it’s taken 3 years before they have flowered and fruited on a shoot.

The reviews here are very accurate and would give you a wide choice to experiment. But with a lot of small shops forced to close in this troubling times, those bargain plants in small boxes you see might be a good option for many, if they don’t manage to acquire off the Net.

Also the Hinnonmaki Yellow is a great little plant too. Being quick to establish, its shoots have a weeping willow like aspect and if they touch the soil it roots easily giving you free plants. The fruit is delicious as is the red version of it. Both Hinnos have high mildew resistance and crop well mid July onwards. They have thorns but not as bad as Invicta which are the worst!

Captivator another superb near thornless variety extends the season late July in early August. The flavour is excellent. The plant itself flowers freely and unlike many gooseberry cultivars which take sometimes 3 years plus before shoots flower and set fruits, Captivator is similar to the Hinnonmaki family in that it bears within 2 years or sometimes 1 year after planting depending on its root system.

I also planted a young planting of Xenia last year, but it is too soon to say how good it will be as the crop was light this year. Appears to be quite vigorous, large fruiting, and adaptable to heavy soils as Whinnam’s Industry. Fruits should be much larger than Hinnonmaki Red when it it develops more next year. No mildew on it as yet nor heavy sawfly attacks which were seen on all the Hinnonmaki plants, but the Yellow not so prevalent as the other two as it is was a lesser attractive plant/tougher? plant. Of all I’d recommend the Yellow and Red without hesitation.

I had numerous purchases of said plant and all were very different, until I actually managed to get the genuine plant from verified stock. What a difference. Fruit is mostly medium sized, plant is vigorous and flowers set freely. No mildew as yet. 3 pounds per season is realistic if plant is left to mature to its full size. The Hinnonmaki Red is double this and far superior.

I think I am blaming the nursery I got the plant from. It has some of the highest reviews  which leaves me a bit confused but I bought a blueberry at the same time about 4 years ago and bought an identical variety from Waitrose at the same time. The plant from the nursery produces the same fruit but the leaves are always smaller and the growth branchier and less yield.

It’s the same story with the hinomaki yellow but I can’t be sure if it is the plant or the variety as I have nothing to compare it with except a very productive red Hinnonmaki. I will have to get a new Hinnonmaki yellow. I think homebase are selling little cuttings for £3 at the moment. I just can’t explain how I have the same variety from 2 different places that grow so differently.

The rest died or rotted from winter wet. Also the cuttings I took from all rooted fairly easily, so I still have my plants.

ANSWER: My choice would be Captivator (see here). It has good mildew resistance, good taste and produces a reasonable crop.

The H Yellow is a strong plant(I’ll keep it for now as it has a unique growing pattern like a strawberry runner and roots easily!) and like its red counterpart and Captivator is quite drought resistant to hot temps even 32oC at peak of heat wave we’ve had. The Captivator plant I’d bought lacked vigor, so could be bad stock or diseased? I’ll get a new plant later to replace this. The H. Red & H Yellow appear not to be pH fussy and grow well in our poor soil. Zero mildew on all plants. If you can live with the thorns the red one is a must for the home garden orchard.

RESPONSE: I would go for Hinnonmaki Red. It is both sweet and red.

RESPONSE: That may well depend on when they last did a trial of gooseberries. A quick search on the internet yielded no results.

Often people assume that RHS AGM is up to date but our research indicates that often they can be 10 or even 20 years out of date. I don’t know if this is the case for gooseberries but it may well be.

REPLY: I’ve never heard of slugs / snails attacking gooseberry bushes. Has any one else any experiences of this?

This year it has set wonderfully again and is a big plant of a metre high by a metre and a high wide. The birds always leave it alone. No plant we’ve had has ever matched this fruit production in a relatively small sized plant.

Highly complex subject, but not a major issue for gooseberry growers in the UK. There is a problem due to warmer winters for growers of traditional blackcurrants which are very high chill(1500-2000 hours) and may not get enough chill in Southern areas of England. For that reason new cultivars are being developed.

It all depends on the model used to measure chill e.g. temps of below 7.2 Celsius counting as 1 hour of chill. It is better to think of it as vernalization when the plant needs temps of between 5 degrees and 10 degrees Celsius to go dormant then get enough chill to achieve initiation of the flowering process after bud break in Spring.

It is a very inaccurate science and subject to many problems in determining accuracy. Gooseberries need a minimum of 800 hours depending on the cultivar or maybe a 1000 hours or even 1200 hours. No general agreement there! Generally the later flowering the cultivar the higher the chill need. Some specially developed gooseberry cultivars like Glendale or Pixwell are said to need only 600 hours of chill as they fruit in Zones 9/10. Good resource below to explain the science better. Hope that helps!

http://fruitsandnuts.ucdavis.edu/Weather_Services/chilling_accumulation_models/about_chilling_units/

Plant A may require many days of cold to produce a crop in spring / summer but plant B may only require a few days of cold weather to do the same. Exactly what the biology is I’m not sure but that’s how it is.

Contrary to popular belief gooseberry is not an easy plant to grow in the context that you can neglect and still get a lot of fruit- not quite true! You must feed and prune. The result is very rewarding!

I did replenish the soil recently with chicken pellets and liberal doses of bone fish blood meal, so that could be the reason they are all flowering profusely with small gooseberries forming.

I have a Jostaberry which after 5 years flowers erratically and gives low crops. I will replace it with something later.

I was given 20 years ago a hybrid cross of Hinnonmaki Green with an older unknown type perhaps wild. It suckers from the roots, flowers early, is very vigorous, has good mildew resistance, not bothered by aphids or sawflies much and gives good yields of very large white yellow fruit which get big and explode, if left on the bush ripening too long.

The gooseberry is indeed a fascinating plant to grow and incredibly adaptive to changing climates unlike blackcurrants which apart from Jostaberry I never had any luck with- reversion, virus etc.

Even now at time of writing I can see small flower buds forming on its small leaves. This plant is not phased by frosts whatsoever. Responds well to pruning as it is very upright and it suckers freely from the base so plenty of cuttings to take. They root easily. Watch out for its thorns though-they are vicious. Thanks.

My wife’s Hinnonmaki Yellow plant had a similar yield of about 1.5kg+. Its growth pattern reminds us of a strawberry with runners, which is unlike the traditional single bare leg growth pattern of gooseberry perse. This spreading cultivar can root easily when long vigorous shoots bury under the soil line. The fruit is really sweet, like a sweet grape, but its thorns are razor sharp needles making pruning a bit of a chore, but still worth growing for its quality fruit. Also it does resist mildew most years. Cheers!

ANSWER: They bear fruit the next year, and also the year after. They will bear fruit for two years or so after that but the amount of fruit will decline.

ANSWER: No it doesn’t Alec. If the tips of the lower stems are bent down to the ground they will probably take root but that’s as spreading as they go. The same goes for all varieties of gooseberries as far as I am aware.

Realistically expect yields in the UK to be a good 3 to 5 pounds by the 4th year. I’ve have had mine for over 10 years. Big yields only started in the 7th year. Beware of poorly sourced cheap gooseberry plants as sometimes cultivars get mixed up. Thanks.

RESPONSE: Robert, if you read this, can you send me the source of your information about the parentage of Captivator, it would be greatly appreciated? I can then update the main article regarding parentage. UPDATE- thanks for the source, the main article has been updated.

My Captivator plant is over 6 feet wide and as big, it can produce 2 to 4 kg in ideal conditions after its establishment. These yields only come when it has been established for 3 to 5 years. Great plant if you get the soil and conditions right in your garden. Hardy to -40o Celsius and grows well in zones 2 to 9.